This weekend, as we celebrate the July 4th holiday, we might compare the prophet Ezekiel’s view of Israel’s history, with our approach to our history. The first thing to note is that Ezekiel’s assessment of Israel is vastly different from our assessment of America. We identify ourselves proudly as rebels. It’s part of our national myth. In the book of Ezekiel, God is not proud of Israel; in fact, God has had it with this rebellious house. “They and their ancestors,” God says about Israel, “have transgressed against me to this very day.” We Americans trumpet our rebel status; for Israel it was an accusation. Americans see themselves as righteous and indignant rebels who originally fought against their oppressive imperial overlords, and they champion to this day their independence from every power and authority that would seek to control and dominate them: The American rebel nature is an American virtue. The prophet Ezekiel, on the other hand, viewed Israel--and here by “Israel” Ezekiel means Israel in its entirety through both time and space—as a nation of misfits who long ago defied, and who to this day persist in rebelling against, the Lord, who formed them and who continues patiently to endure and nurture them, and thus as impudent and stubborn refusenicks, who stand against anything and everything the Lord their God tries to teach and give them: Israel, therefore, is a rebellious house and there is nothing good to say about that.

There is another dramatic difference. For Ezekiel—and this is true of the entire biblical tradition—narrative, word, and history are crucial for understanding God and the world. Our take on God and the world, however, is totally subjective and self-centered, and our appreciation of history is amazingly thin. For Ezekiel, and thus for the Bible as a whole, the existence, purpose and meaning of the world, and indeed of all reality, is rooted in the story of God’s dealings with Israel. God acts on behalf of the nations, humanity, and the world in and through the history of Israel. God identifies himself by this history. To answer the question: who or what is God?, we need word, narrative, history to tell us. Thus according the Bible, the question of God is answered this way: Rather than a subjective feeling in my heart or idea in my mind, God is precisely the great I AM, who rescued Israel from her Egyptian overlords. This great I AM is precisely the Father who raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead in the power of the Spirit. We cannot separate God from his involvement in Israel’s history.

It used to be said that a notion of divine Providence was an indispensible part of the American story. America was thought to have prospered and become a great nation because God had given it a divine mandate. Our history was guided; it had a trajectory and a goal. No one believes that anymore. For 21st century Americans, God is merely a personal projection and myth, and the notion of divine Providence is a delusion, a throwback to the quaint ideas of dead visionaries. And as history has become increasingly subjectivized (I’ve got my history and you’ve got yours) and paganized (it is no longer thought to be guided by someone), it has lost its point and its purpose, and is open to manipulation and management. Twenty-first century America history has become irrelevant and impossible, and it has come to resemble something that more and more looks like propaganda.

The first thing we need to do, then, is to listen carefully to what the prophet Ezekiel is saying and to whom he is saying it. Ezekiel is sent to rebellious Israel for one purpose and one purpose only: he to deliver God’s word. He is to say to them, “Thus says the Lord.” He is sent to a rebellious house to deliver God’s word--period. Ezekiel is the instrument, God is the speaker. Ezekiel is vulnerable, God alone is powerful. Ezekiel is not to worry about how his audience will react to his message or about the consequences of his words or actions. He must worry only about his own faithfulness to God’s command. He is to be concerned only about carrying out his appointed task. There are no guarantees that the prophet will get a hearing. The presumption, in fact, is that he probably will not.

How similar this is to Jesus’ sending out the twelve two-by-two just after his home town took offense and turned away from him. “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house,” Jesus said. The text adds that he “was amazed at their unbelief.” Jesus does not promise the disciples any better hearing as they go off on their own missionary journeys. As they speak and act in his name, they will encounter the same resistance. They will be exposed and vulnerable—in fact this is a basic aspect of their mission--and they will meet with opposition, because their audience, like Ezekiel’s, will be the rebellious house of Israel. Their opposition to Jesus stems from the same motivation that rejected the prophets that were sent earlier to them. One would think that the disciples, knowing this history well, would have been discouraged by this sad but true comparison, but instead they go out and proclaim that all should repent, they cast out demons, and they anoint and cure the sick. By this the world will know that a prophet has been among them; by this all will know that God is present and acting among them in Jesus Christ. None of the words the disciples speak or the things they do are spoken and accomplished in the disciples’ name or by the disciples’ power. When they speak, it is “Thus says the Lord,” when they drive out demons it is in the name of Christ, when they heal it is by the power of the Spirit. These are signs that God’s kingdom is breaking in, really breaking in to our world and into our lives, breaking into world history by way of Israel’s fraught and troubled story, for her life and her salvation. God has staked everything, even enduring the death of his only-begotten Son, on the salvation of his people, despite their rebellion, their hardheartedness, and their rejection. Far too much is at stake. God’s own integrity and identity, and indeed the future life and blessing of the world—these things are riding on the divine accomplishment of Israel’s ultimate redemption.

This brings us back to the 4th of July holiday. What used to be celebrated as a manifest destiny that, for both good and for ill, motivated our forebears to feats of technological prowess and innovation on the one hand, and into pure naked wars of expansion and conquest on the other, both of which achievements, the good and the bad alike, stemming from a belief that some unseen hand was guiding us, now because there is no such hand anymore in our collective imagination, our history seems to flow more or less arbitrarily, characterized these days by a hunger for mind-numbing distractions and by fear.

We no longer trust the future and we are in danger of losing hope. That was the problem with ancient paganism in which life was a tragedy determined by fate. It is also the problem with the neo-paganism that today grips our culture.

The purpose of Scripture opens up a new possibility: it announces the future, the Kingdom of God, the kingdom that both the prophets and Jesus announced and which Jesus brings into being through his death and resurrection. The biblical prophets, such as Ezekiel, were given the task of announcing this kingdom, and the church collectively has assumed that prophetic function in its God-given mission to proclaim the gospel. Jesus sends us out to proclaim God’s kingdom with everything we’ve got, as best we can, and aided by the Spirit. That task determines our life, and our vision. But are we up to the task? A contemporary Lutheran commentator on Ezekiel puts this question to us: “Which is more real—that is, more resistant to our whim and more to be relied upon—the future present in vision and promise, or what we experience if we reject vision and distrust promise? Modernity has tended to suppose the latter. But scripture throughout presumes the former: that what is coming is the very being of what is” [Jenson]. The promise of the future is what really is, even if it has not happened yet, because if Jesus lives, it will come as promised, and it will replace everything that has come before it. That promise is prefigured in and through Israel’s history, even when all one can say about Israel, as Ezekiel does, that she is a house of rebellion. And yes, it will come through our proclamation, even if that proclamation falls on deaf ears, and even if the label “rebel” is all that can be said about us as well.

-Amen-